It's my intention to read carefully through this thread again tonight, but I was halfway through an answer to Green Granite on another thread when I thought I'd best move over to this one.
Following some hiccups, I now have one 400 gig drive destined to be my Win 7 unit. It is divided into C: 100g D: 50 g and E: the remainder. I still have a lot of data on E: but D: is newly formatted. E: is backed up.
My XP home, is on a smaller physical drive, and temporally holds the OS. This only has C: plus D: as a restore partition.
The OS in the larger drive still operates at this time. (XP pro.)
I would like a coherent download that could be used again, and therefore will be copied onto a DVD. But what is the most logical way to do this?
D: on the target drive has 50g to use as a dumping ground. Can I then install from there?
C: could be formatted first, giving a green-field site, but this would, I assume, mean using the other physical drive as the holding tank and indeed using its OS and browser to facilitate the maneuver. I would have to be sure in this case, that the download would not be installing as it arrived, or the drive letters would be wrong.
I'm trying to figure out the best way to maneuver but am really demonstrating my lack of knowledge.
NB. It might be obvious exactly how to proceed when I press the download button. But I've never downloaded anything bigger than Open Office, and that of course didn't involve the OS. I'm concerned of course, that I'll end up with no valid OS and no start-up disc.